Blood was coming from her mouth. She swallowed several times. She put her hand to her jaw, stroking it. Then she laughed.

Coño began to bark, straining at her lead. She whined until Sabine gave in to her. Together they headed away, towards a footpath through the construction site.

I watched them go with my heart thrashing.

Then Sabine stopped and turned back.

She threw something, calling, “To remember me by.”

After she was gone, I bent down and picked up what had hit me.

It was a tooth.

Part VI

43

For two decades I’ve kept her tooth in the heart-shaped box.

Glancing up at where I’ve put it, I take a sip of cold coffee and carry on. Typing has become the sound that soothes me most on the nights I can’t sleep. It’s like I’m trying to crack a code; the light taps are the different combinations. I don’t know what I’m doing. But a few moves forward, a few back, I keep on.

King’s Cross was the last time Sabine and I were together. Though I was also never again free of her. She became part of the fabric of my mind; a line of the music in my head; a color, the color blue, whenever I saw it. Because of her, I learned French, even lived with a French partner near the border of Belgium in the Ardennes. When the misconceived relationship ended, I stumbled into a job as a freelance translator; over the years, it turned into a career.

Yet Sabine was more than in the language, the subtle tonalities, the pulse of what I was, what I had become. Ideas of her life continued to influence me long after we lost contact. The nature of the influence shifted according to the various endings, like ledges, which I assumed she’d scaled or fallen to.

Once, I thought I saw her at Piccadilly Circus. I was thirty-two, so she would have been the same. Standing by a bin, she was eating a greasy pastry. Her appearance had changed. She was thick-waisted and heavy-limbed, her hair dyed a prematurely middle-aged burgundy; even her elfin features seemed broader, coarsened. She wore a fake fur coat and makeup that looked gaudy in the daylight. Discarding the wrapper, she slurped from a paper cup and belched. When she tried to squash the cup in the bin, it wouldn’t fit. She checked to see if a woman a few paces away had noticed.